Oracle Announces Oracle Fusion Applications

At Oracle OpenWorld last week, Oracle unveiled Oracle Fusion Applications. Commenting on the debut of Oracle Fusion Applications during a keynote that highlighted major OpenWorld announcements, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, explained that the Oracle Fusion Applications portfolio andtakes the best features of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, the Oracle E-Business Suite, and Siebel and re-implements them on top of a modern middleware infrastructure entirely written in Java.

"First, we had to build all the middleware and once all the middleware was built, we could then rebuild all the applications," said Ellison, noting, "It has been and continues to be an enormous engineering effort."

Oracle will start to deliver these applications to customers at the end of this year, and in the first quarter of the next calendar year, Oracle Fusion Applications will be generally available. "Finally, for the first time ever, the Fusion Applications that we deliver to you will be built on top of 100% vanilla Fusion Middleware, nothing added. Fusion Middleware completely supports Fusion Applications," Ellison said.

Oracle Fusion Applications coexist with existing Oracle Applications. As one module, a product family or the entire suite, customers can choose to leverage the advances pioneered by Oracle at a pace that matches business needs for a new level of performance.

"We are going to spend over $4 billion this fiscal year in R&D and that budget allows us to not only finish Fusion and enhance it, but continue to enhance JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and the E-Business Suite, and keep it current, and keep it doing the job at your company," Ellison assured attendees.

Built on an SOA foundation, Oracle Fusion Applications give users the ability to manage functions across a heterogeneous environment, such as Distributed Order Orchestration and Shared Services Procurement. Oracle Fusion Applications also offer a new role-based user experience, uniting exception-based processing, business intelligence, transactions and collaboration in context of the work being performed. Oracle Fusion Applications provides user with: "what do I need to know," "what do I need to do," "how do I get it done," and "who do I need to contact." Additionally, Oracle Fusion Applications feature embedded business intelligence that delivers the right information to make decisions within the context of the work being performed, without having to go to a separate BI system.